My experience since I started working in the social media field is that the failures are where you learn the most as a community manager, a social media manger, a change manger, a professional and as a person.

Yet, organizations tend to have a low tolerance for failure even though it is failure that often leads to innovations and improvements in products, services or processes. Leaders often blame change managers or teams who do not control the source or circumstances which cause the “failure.” Having a low tolerance for small failures can actually lead to more catastrophic failures.

Though many orgs flaunt their “lessons learned” they are not all written down, distributed, or accessible depending on the enterprise architecture. Too often, these lessons end up on individuals’ computers, shared drives or locked away in portals and are not shared in order to prevent repeated mistakes. Most organizations lack the enterprise 2.0 tools that they need to help their workers become more efficient at their jobs.  This lack of tools can prevent individuals from learning from their previous missteps and reaching full productive work potential. There is also general lack of integrated risk management systems in business for employees to submit risks to the organization for tracking, sourcing and mitigation. The workers on the front lines of the change are often the first to see signs of trouble yet, in most org structures, they have the least interaction with upper management.

I think that the previous blog post by Tom is a great lead into this month’s discussion and #4CHANGE chat topic.  The 4Change Team thinks that this topic is a really important.

#4 Change September Chat Topic: Change Failure / Change #Fails

#4Change Chat Questions on Change Failure:

1. What is the value of failure?
2. What roles do change failures play in furthering larger change campaigns in organization?
3. What constitutes change failure / success inside and outside of your organization?
4. As a change/community manager, how do you handle separation / transition issues with the community and the organization?
5. How do failures in society, business and government affect change in non-profits?

Here are some background definitions to stir your thoughts about this months topic.

Failure (definitions from Visual Thesaurus):

• an act that fails
• an event that does not accomplish its intended purpose
• lack of success
• a person with a record of failing, someone who loses consistently
• an unexpected omission
• inability to discharge all your debts as they come due
• loss of ability to function normally
• condition in which there is a disturbance of normal functioning
• a mistake resulting from neglect
• your overall circumstances or condition in life (including everything that happens to you)
• an event that happens
• an act that does not achieve it’s intended goal

Success:

• an event that accomplishes its intended purpose
• an attainment that is successful
• a state of prosperity or fame
• a person with a record of successes
• the condition of prospering; having good fortune
• the act of achieving an aim
• an event that happens

Change:

• an event that occurs when something passes from one stat or phase to another
• a relational difference between states; especially between states before and after some event
• the action of changing something
• the result of alteration or modification
• a thing that is different phenomenon that follows and is caused by some previous phenomenon
• something done (usually as apposed to something said)

Please feel free to leave question and comments on this subject and if you have open case studies or links to resources on the topic. Cross-posted from Todd’s Zero Strategist  Blog.

In addition to instigating the #4change chats I have also been involved in establishing another monthly twitter-based conversation for social entrepreneurs, their supporters and partners called #SocEntChat. Having just written this post for SocialEarth I thought people visiting here would also be interested in knowing about it:

Twitter is proving to be an incredibly powerful tool for entrepreneurs, activists and researchers to share their stories, ideas and causes, building tribes of followers who can help them in their missions. #SocEntChat uses Twitter as a platform to bring these people together, convening monthly real-time forums to help identify promising initiatives and techniques, connect with possible allies and partners and share knowledge and insights.

I initiated #SocEntChat (short of Social Entrepreneur Chat) as part of my role as Digital Marketing Strategist at Ashoka, an international citizen-sector organization founded by Bill Drayton, often called “the father of social entrepreneurship,” which seeks to create an Everyone a Changemaker world. After 28 years of supporting leading social entrepreneurs in over 70 countries and building infrastructure to support changemakers we see an incredibly important part of our mission as convening social entrepreneurs and their supporters to help accelerate change.

So the question I asked myself as I launched our account @AshokaTweets earlier this year was, how could Twitter help us further this mission? After having been inspired by the success of the weekly #Journchat discussions, which focus on how technology is impacting journalism and PR, we made the decision to use our networks to host an equivalent monthly event for social entrepreneurs. Nathaniel Whittemore, social entrepreneurship blogger at Change.org agreed to be my co-host and the first #SocEntChat was held in April to try and capture the learnings from the Skoll World Forum. Since then we have covered Social Entrepreneurship on Campuses and Green Entrepreneurship. You can read the transcripts here, here, and here. You can also read the reflections from David Strelneck, coordinator of Green Initiatives at Ashoka, on the last #SocEntChat here.

We have been thrilled by the response and the quality of the conversations help so far. Despite the severe length limitations of Twitter the discussions have reached a surprising depth, whether in considering how new voices could be heard at the Skoll World Forum, how to better connect students and off-campus communities or the best role for Government in fostering green innovation.

This Wednesday from 4-6pm US EDT (GMT-4) we’ll explore the exciting possibilities of Mobile Innovation, a week after Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation co-hosted an event in Nairobi Kenya on this topic. Innovation in the use of mobile technologies for social change are leaping rapidly ahead, whether in the form of The Extraordinaries use of smart phones for volunteering, using SMS to share the daily price of goods at market so that rural farmers in Africa get a better deal or mobile phones being used for banking in the absence of more traditional  financial infrastructure.

I hope you’ll join us!